How’d you spend your summer vacation? I got the new comment system for this site working. (Okay, that’s not quite true, I only spent some of the first day doing that.) Like everything else with this redesign, it took me much longer than I’d anticipated. The main reason was again added functionality.

Now like many of the better comment-enabled sites out there, this version will soon (and the new design will):

• offer comment previews;
• allow valid XHTML or plain text (thanks to a modified version of Simon Willison’s SafeHtmlChecker);
• identify my comments in an obvious (like Dave Shea), and more secure way;
• decrease the visual impact of anonymous comments (again, like Mr. Shea);
• and use some DOM-magic to clean-up spam protected email and Web addresses.

Planned, but not yet implemented (because it won’t work in the current design):

• permalinks for each comment;
• and numbering on each comment.